PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Hello Everyone:

Plans are in high gear for our 8th Annual Spring Meeting and Benefit
Auction to be held Saturday April 4th, 2009 at the War Memorial in
Johnstown, PA. By now every member should have received a letter with an invitation to the Spring Meeting and a donation form. We hope you will dig deep and contribute an item or items to the Association for the auction. This meeting is FREE to all active members and a FREE booth ( on a first come first serve basis) is available to any member donating to the auction. Please remember that the monies raised at this auction keep our dues low and fund our lobbying efforts at the state capital along with our member services. So mark your calendars and plan to come to Johnstown and enjoy the day!

Many of you may be wondering why we are not going back to the Altoona Blair County Convention Center. I must admit it was a beautiful facility and would have served us well for along time. The management was too hard to work with and the cost was extremely high. I had many conversations with their sales director but could not get them to adjust to what our board felt was a fair and reasonable cost for the facilities in the future. The city of Johnstown has always been very interested in our business, at a fair price, so back to Johnstown we go.

Now that the Top 30 Sale and Midwest Select Sales are over many people have been asking me what I thought about the sales. I believe they did very well in this current economy. They were solid auctions where some consignments brought top dollar and some consignments favored the buyers. Overall the total of the auctions were strong.

As far as our end market many Hunting Ranches got of to a slow start in 2008 and then finished up with banner years. People just had to go shoot a big deer. We need to remember that over $15 billion dollars are spent annually in pursuit of the whitetail deer in North America. Now that our industry has 250"+ deer available to hunt we can add the World Wide Big Game revenues to those $15 billion dollars. Each year we just need a small percentage of those total dollars to shift to our industry and the numbers are huge. What a tremendous end market we have to tape. I have said it now for twenty years and my attitude hasn't changed. Our industry can do nothing but grow. There will be economic ups and downs but our greatest enemy will be legislation and regulations that will negatively impact our industry. So make sure you support the PDFA and NADeFA so these new administrations don't take away our rights to raise and hunt deer on our lands.

I would like to close by thanking all of you who did something to help
the Association move forward in 2008. The PA Deer Farmers Association is viewed across the country as one of the leading state associations in the deer industry. It wasn't done by any one person but collectively by each and every one of us. So let's keep the ball
rolling and get involved in the upcoming Spring Meeting. See you in
Johnstown, PA on April 4th, 2009.


Have a great Spring,

Dave Griffith, President

 

UPCOMING EVENTS:
2009 Scheduled meeting dates
Friday, March 27
Thursday, May 14
Thursday, June 25
Thursday, August 20
Friday & Saturday, September 11 & 12 (Fall Sale)
Friday, October 16
Friday, November 20

 

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